Patent ID: 8090187

Claim:
A pattern inspection method comprising: sequentially imaging plural chips formed on a substrate; selecting at least one of pattern sections of each inspection image obtained by the imaging, while discarding other pattern sections, based on a recipe which is created in advance, the recipe including information for determining which pattern sections are to be selected and other pattern sections to be discarded, wherein the at least one of pattern sections are parts of an object to be inspected for which amounts of displacement of the object to be inspected are used for determining alignment of the object to be inspected, and the recipe is created in advance by using another substrate different from the substrate to be inspected, the another substrate being same kind or type as the substrate; calculating a position gap between an inspection image of a chip obtained by the imaging and a reference image stored in a memory, by using positional information of pattern images included in the inspection image and reference pattern images included in the reference image, which are both corresponding to the at least one of pattern sections selected at the selecting step based on the recipe created in advance using said another substrate; aligning the inspection image and the reference image by using information of the calculated position gap based on the positional information of pattern images of the inspection image and the reference pattern images corresponding to the at least one of pattern sections selected in the selecting step based on the recipe created in advance using said another substrate which recipe includes information for determining which pattern sections are to be selected to determine alignment and which pattern sections are to be discarded, and not used for alignment; and comparing the aligned inspection image with the reference image, and extracting a difference between the two images as a defect candidate.