Recently, in the semiconductor industry, supplying the advanced devices to the market faster than one's competitors at a competitive price has become a key factor determining the success or failure of businesses. Consequently, semiconductor manufacturing processes are accelerating towards reduced feature size and increased complexity, the number of defects that need to be detected is increasing, and inspection equipment is becoming more sensitive. With conventional inspection and analysis procedures, it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve a fast ramp-up in the yield of mass production processes. Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation has developed a Defect Review SEM and Application systems, and has proposed solutions for the efficient extraction of useful data for process improvement and process control from the large volume of defects in semiconductor manufacturing processes.