Yasmeen Do not anneal it or the grain will grow in size and reorient and your grain size measurement will be meaningless. You can measure grain size with a good SEM or determine grain size with x-ray diffraction. Typically the plated copper grain starts small, but grows larger as it plates. Depending on the plating system it may grow in oriented long thin grains or fat chunky grains or very small grains a few atoms in diameter. As you are talking about wafers, I suspect you are dealing with thicknesses less than 1/10 micron thick. The grain size for this thickness may be only 30-50 angstroms thick and randomly oriented. Epitaxy will also influence the size and orientation, so it may depends on what your substrate looks like to the plating process. Suggest you go for diffraction first and determine lattice parameters and orientation. You can then calculate the effective particle size or grain size. Phil Hinton ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################