Searching for ICS1702 NiMH charger IC

I've been wanting to get my hands on a few a these (perhaps 10) ever since my experiments showed the advantages of negative pulse charging. Even putting that aside, this IC has some nice features such as cutting back the fast charge as the voltage passes the inflection point. I wish to build a few charging circuits based on this IC. I can probably do something similar with a few discrete chips, but if the ICS1702 isn't terribly expensive it will make my life easier. Of course, if it's much more than about $5 I'm not terribly interested, except maybe in one or two pieces.

Anyone know of any distributors here in the US? I've tried eBay with no luck, and my other searches have come up empty. If anyone has some they can sell me I might be interested as well, provided it's not too pricey. Figure at $5 each I'll take one or two. At maybe $2 or less I'll probably be interested in ten or so. I don't see myself needing more than ten, although if the price is right I'll gladly buy a tube if someone has no use for it. I can always sell the ones I don't need to any other CPF members who may want them.

I have a few - but I paid on the order of $8 to $10 about 8 years ago back when it was still ICS rather than Galaxy Power. I've been using them over the years and I think they are an excellent charge controller. I doubt you'll find a distributor (if there is one) that would sell them in the $5 or less range in the small quantity that you're looking for. If you do, I wouldn't mind picking a few more up myself /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Not much help to you of course...

george.

I did manage to find Galaxy Power's website. I'll ask them about prices and/or distributors. There is a mention of samples, so maybe they can send me one or two for evaluation. I've gotten loads of free samples from Analog Devices but different manufacturers obviously have different policies with regard to samples. Considering that ICs usually get cheaper as production quantities go up, it may very well be less than $8 to $10 now. Even at that price, I would certainly buy one or two just to play around with.