CIRCUIT PATTERN INSPECTION APPARATUS AND CIRCUIT PATTERN INSPECTION METHOD

摘要

High-speed inspection is performed with appropriate sensitivity according to the pattern density and pattern characteristic of a device. The pixel dimension used in image acquisition is changed in accordance with the pattern density of a device. An image is acquired at high speed by changing the beam scan speed and the stage drive speed in accordance with the pixel dimension and eliminating an error by controlling the amount of beam delay. The acquired image is so resampled that the image dimensions of the acquired image and a reference image are equally sized, and the acquired image and the reference image are then aligned with each other. The aligned images are resampled in accordance with a preset pixel dimension to extract a difference between the images with the sensitivity according to the pixel dimension.