The morphology of copper films grown on quartz, mica, and Ti/quartz has been investigated by means of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Films grown on quartz, both bare and pre-plated with titanium, are characterized by self-affine fractal scaling behavior over the length scale of 10 similar to 500 nm, while films grown on mica are not. Annealing of the films to 340 degrees C reduces the root-mean-square (RMS) roughness values, despite the overall scaling behavior remains the same. Films grown on bare quartz have significantly larger RMS roughness than those grown on mica, or quartz pre-plated with titanium. For the latter two cases, the RMS roughness is very low, 1-4 nm for the length scale of L = 500 run. The overall dependence of copper film morphology on various substrates were discussed in terms of interfacial reaction, lattice mismatch, and surface energy difference of interface surfaces. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.