Patent Document ID: 20090231424
Application ID: 12379645
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A manufacturing process monitoring system comprising: a hotspot searching apparatus including a SEM apparatus and an SEM image processing unit that processes SEM images obtained by imaging a semiconductor wafer whose surface is formed with patterns by the SEM apparatus and searches for process monitoring points; and a process monitoring point monitoring apparatus for evaluating the shapes or dimensions of circuit patterns of the process monitoring points searched by the hotspot searching apparatus, wherein the hotspot searching apparatus images the semiconductor wafer having a plurality of regions where circuit patterns have been formed under different manufacturing process conditions by the SEM apparatus, processes the SEM images of every region obtained by imaging the semiconductor wafer by the SEM image processing unit to obtain differences, extracts points where the differences exceed a reference value as process monitoring point candidates, and narrows-down the extracted process monitoring point candidates, so as to search for the processing monitoring points, and the process monitoring point monitoring apparatus images the images of the process monitoring points on the basis of the process monitoring points having been searched by the hotspot searching apparatus and evaluates the shapes or dimensions of circuit patterns of the process monitoring points on the basis of the imaged images, in a region on a semiconductor wafer different from the semiconductor wafer on which the processing monitoring points have been searched or a region different from the region on the semiconductor wafer.