Patent ID: 7133550

Claim:
A pattern inspection method comprising: conditioning for setting up a mask region in a specimen to be inspected; and inspecting for detecting defects on the specimen and outputting information of defects which are detected in areas other than said mask region on said specimen, wherein said inspecting operation is applied to plural specimens one after another, and the conditioning operation includes: obtaining a digital image of a test inspection area of the specimen for testing through microscopic observation thereof; detecting defect candidates of a pattern formed in said test inspection area of said specimen for testing by comparing said digital image with a reference image stored in a memory; displaying on a display screen, positional distribution data of the defects detected in said test inspection area of said specimen for testing in a map format; defining said mask region in said test inspection area on said display screen in which said detected defects are displayed in a map format; and saving a data of said defined mask region in a recipe to be used in subsequent iterations of the inspection operation.