Charged particle beam apparatus

Abstract

In a pattern inspection of a semiconductor circuit, to specify a cause of a process defect, not only a distribution on and across wafer of the number of defects but also more detailed, that is, the fact that how many defects occurred where on the semiconductor pattern is needed to be specified in some cases. Accordingly, the present invention aims to provide an apparatus capable of easily specifying a cause of a process defect based upon a positional relationship of a distribution of defect occurrence frequency and a pattern. The apparatus includes: a charged particle beam optical system for detecting secondary charged particles by irradiating the charged particle beam to the sample; an image processing unit for, based upon a plurality of images to be inspected that are obtained by the secondary charged particles, obtaining an occurrence frequency of defect candidates for each of predetermined regions inside the detected image; and a display unit for displaying the distribution of the occurrence frequency of the defect candidates so that a positional relationship to the pattern is recognized.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.