PURPOSE: To prevent the interposition of a man as a dust source by automatically conducting the various inspection of a wafer after the completion of development in a lithographic process perfectly with high accuracy.

CONSTITUTION: A wafer 1 after resist development is completed is carried as it is left as it is housed in a wafer cassette while being fed to a wafer holding section 2 by a wafer supply section 3. The wafer holding section 2 aligns the directions of rotation of the wafers 1, and a film-thickness inspection section 4 inspects the resist-film thickness of the wafers 1 extending over the whole surfaces of the wafers 1. A first surface inspection section 5 inspects the presence of foreign matters and flaws, a second surface inspection section 6 inspects a defective resist pattern, and a third surface inspection section 7 measures the displacement of alignment of a mask pattern and the width of a pattern line with submicron accuracy. A wafer discharge section 10 houses wafers 1 decided to be nondefectives into a nondefective housing cassette, and houses wafers 1 decided to be defectives into a defective cassette.