The dataset ranks 74 assignees across 271 records, with the top-ranked assignee holding 19 records and the top five combined holding 83 records, 30.6% of the total. That concentration is meaningful but not absolute: the top 10 together hold 52.0% of records, meaning roughly half of all filings sit outside the leading ten companies. Anyone assessing this space should look at both the leaderboard and the long tail, since the tail includes newer entrants working on packaging and pixel-pitch reduction rather than core sensing physics.

Filings fell sharply between 2021 and 2024, from 18 to 4 records, a 78% decline, and 2017 remains the peak year in the dataset at 19 records. That is a genuine pullback, not an artifact of missing data, because 2024 is the most recent year the dataset treats as complete. Figures for 2025 and later are still understated due to the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication, so it is too early to say whether the decline continues past 2024.

US20140166882A1, filed by Institut National d’Optique, claims an uncooled microbolometer built from a suspended platform, a thermistor, and a conductive optical absorber patterned into a resonant structure that defines the detector’s absorption spectrum, assembled into an array for terahertz detection. It blocks designs that combine those specific elements, particularly the resonant-absorber-on-platform architecture, for terahertz-band uncooled detection. Designs using different absorber geometries, different support structures, or targeting other spectral bands may sit outside its claim scope, but that requires a claim-by-claim comparison rather than a general assumption.