METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETECTING A CIRCUIT PATTERN

A method and apparatus for detecting a circuit pattern comprise a stage for mounting an object under inspection having a circuit pattern to be detected, means of generating a signal in response to the amount of movement of the stage, a detection optical system for detecting the circuit pattern, an opto-electric transducer which receives the image of the pattern provided by the detection optical system and transforms the image into an image signal, means of calculating the amount of expansion or contraction of the object by detecting the distance between specific patterns on the object, and drive control means which produces a clock signal for the opto-electric transducer based on the stage movement signal provided by the signal generation means and varies the clock signal so as to vary the dimension of the detected image arbitrarily.