An attempt has been made to correlate the morphological and electrical properties of RF sputtered aluminum nitride (AlN), with target to substrate distance (D ts) in sputter chamber. AlN films, having thickness around 3,000 Å, were deposited on silicon substrates with different D tsvalues varying from 5 to 8 cm. XRD results indicated that the crystallinity of c-axis oriented films increase significantly with decrease in D ts and the FTIR absorption band of the films became prominent at shorter D ts. The surface roughness increased from 1.85 to 2.45 nm with that in D ts. A smooth surface with smaller grains was found at shorter D ts. The capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements revealed that the insulator charge density (Q in) increased from 3.3 × 10 11 to 7.3 × 10 11 cm -2and the interface state density (D it) from 1.5 × 10 11 to 7.3 × 10 11 eV -1cm -2 with the increase in D ts. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007.