Method and apparatus for detecting diversion

DETAILED DESCRIPTION The present invention has been made in view of these circumstances and it is an object of the invention to provide a method and apparatus for detecting any diversion that may be caused during a registration exposure, an overall lithographic magnification, etc.
, without developing the photo-sensitive substrate.
Thus, the present invention comprises aligning a substrate to be exposed having first patterns formed at given positions and a photosensitive layer formed on the surface and a mask having second patterns in such a manner that given positional relations are established between the first and second patterns, projecting an exposure energy beam onto the substrate to be exposed through the mask to form latent images of the second patterns on the photosensitive layer, photoelectrically detecting the latent images by utilizing the fact that the exposed portions subjected to the projection of the energy beam for the latent images and the unexposed portion not subjected to the projection differ in optical characteristics from each other, photoelectrically detecting the first patterns and detecting positional relations between the first patterns and the latent images, thereby detecting a diversion between the substrate to be exposed and the mask without developing the substrate to be exposed.