The effects of furnace and rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on the electrical and structural properties of r.f. sputtered amorphous silicon carbide films were investigated. It was found that RTA has a similar effect on the structural properties of our films as compared with furnace annealing. The conductance results showed that the effect of annealing on the interface trapped charge density (D-it) for the unhydrogenated films can be explained using the conclusion obtained from the infra-red (IR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) results.