Patent Document ID: 8547429
Application ID: 12379645
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A manufacturing process monitoring apparatus, comprising: a hotspot searching apparatus, including a SEM apparatus and an SEM image processing unit, configured to process SEM images obtained by the SEM apparatus when imaging a semiconductor wafer whose surface is formed with patterns, and to search for process monitoring points; and a process monitoring point monitoring apparatus configured to evaluate shapes and/or dimensions of circuit patterns of the process monitoring points searched by the hotspot searching apparatus; wherein the hotspot searching apparatus is configured to use the SEM apparatus to image the semiconductor wafer having a plurality of regions where circuit patterns have been formed under different manufacturing process conditions, to use the SEM image processing unit to process the SEM images of every region obtained by imaging the semiconductor wafer in order to obtain differences, to extract points where the differences exceed a reference value and to define the extracted points as process monitoring point candidates, and to select a subset of the extracted process monitoring point candidates to be process monitoring points excepting a point corresponding to an insignificant region including a pattern that is meaningless in view of an electric circuit, or where a pattern has been formed in consideration of a pattern change, so as to enable searching for the process monitoring points; and wherein the process monitoring point monitoring apparatus is configured to capture the images of the process monitoring points on the basis of the process monitoring points searched by the hotspot searching apparatus, and to evaluate shapes and/or dimensions of circuit patterns of the process monitoring points on the basis of the captured images, in a region on a semiconductor wafer different from the semiconductor wafer on which the process monitoring points have been searched or in a region different from the region on the semiconductor wafer on which the process monitoring points have been searched.