Patent 7251024 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on July, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A defect inspection apparatus for inspecting a fine circuit pattern with high resolution to detect a defective portion is constructed to have an objective lens for detecting an image of a sample, a laser illumination unit for illuminating the sample through the objective lens, a unit for reducing the coherence of the laser illumination, an accumulation type detector, and a unit for processing the detected image signal.