Patent ID: 7710557

Claim:
A surface defect inspection apparatus comprising: a stage that holds an inspection sample; an illumination optical system that linearly irradiates a laser beam onto the inspection sample, and forms a line illumination region on the inspection sample surface; at least one detection optical system that detects scattered light from the line illumination region on the inspection sample surface; and a detection unit that converts scattered light from the line illumination region detected by the detection optical system to an electrical signal; wherein the stage is moved in a longitudinal direction of the line illumination region on the inspection sample surface at a feed pitch shorter than a longitudinal length of the line illumination region; wherein the illumination optical system performs a plurality of linear laser beam irradiations onto a same region of the inspection sample, wherein the at least one detection optical system includes a detector having two or more light receiving sections, and wherein the two or more light receiving sections are set to have different sensitivity.