Patent attributes
High-resolution thermopile infrared sensor array having a plurality of parallel signal processing channels for the signals of a sensor array and a digital port for serially emitting the signals. Each signal processing channel comprises at least one analog to digital converter and is assigned a memory for storing the results of the analog to digital converters. Power consumption of the infrared sensor array is reduced in the case of a sensor array with at least 16 rows and at least 16 columns, in that no more than 8 or 16 pixels are connected to a signal processing channel. The number of signal processing channels corresponds to at least 4 times the number of rows. Some of the signal processing channels are disposed in the intermediate space between the pixels and others are disposed in an outer edge region of the sensor chip surrounding the sensor array along with other electronics.
