Patent ID: 7700919

Claim:
A device for detecting electromagnetic radiation, comprising an array of elementary bolometers which are sensitive to incident radiation and are referred to as “active” bolometers and an additional row of bolometers which are substantially insensitive to said radiation and are referred to as “blind”, said active and blind bolometers being formed on a substrate in which a read circuit is produced for sequential addressing of each of the rows of the array and the row of blind bolometers, each of the bolometers in the same row being biased simultaneously, wherein the read circuit also comprises a single source for producing a reference current (I ref ) on the basis of an additional blind bolometer which is also formed on the substrate and means of copying said reference current (I ref ) to each of the columns of the array consisting of a current mirror; wherein each of the columns of the array comprises a compensation structure designed to shunt most of the background electric current or common mode current comprising a blind bolometer of said additional row, associated with a current integrator designed to integrate the difference between the current flowing through the active bolometer of the row which is currently being read and a compensation current output by said blind bolometer of said additional row; and wherein during the phase when said additional row is read, a copy of reference current (I ref ) is derived from a current output by said additional blind bolometer via a switch connected to said current integrator.