polarity is among the critical characteristics that could governs the functionality of piezoelectric materials. In this study, the polarity of aluminum nitride (AlN) thin films was inverted from Al-polar to N-polar by doping Si into AlN in the range of 1-15 at.%. Polarity inversion from Al-polar to N-polar also occurred when MgSi was codoped into AlN with Mg to Si ratio was less than 1. However, the polarity can be reversed from N-polar to Al-polar when the ratio of Mg and Si was greater than 1. The effect of Si and MgSi addition was investigated with regards to their crystal structure, lattice parameters, polarity distribution and the oxidation state of each elements. Furthermore, the effect of intermediate layer as well as the presence of point defect (i.e. aluminum vacancy) were investigated and how these factors influence the polarity of the thin films are discussed in this report.Wurtzite structure aluminum nitride (AlN) is one of the important building blocks for various advanced electromechanical and optoelectronics devices. AlN has been touted as a promising material for radio frequency (RF) acoustic devices such as resonators, due to its high acoustic velocity, high quality (Q) factor, thermal stability and the compatibility with CMOS technology 1 . With the ever-growing market of wireless telecommunication devices, the need to continuously enhance the piezoelectric property of AlN has made it the subject of extensive study and research.Improving the piezoelectric properties of AlN can be done by either augmenting the magnitude of piezoelectric response along c-axis (d 33 ) or by controlling the polarity of the thin film. Since the non-centrosymmetry of wurtzite AlN is the origin of polarization along the c-axis, a highly c-oriented AlN thin film could exhibits either Al-or N-polarity 2 . While considerable efforts have been devoted to find the best dopants that could produce the highest enhancement in the piezoelectric response 3-5 , manipulating the polarity of AlN is equally essential in designing high performance devices, since having thin film with different polarity could lead to different electronic property and eventually alter the performance of the developed device 2,6-8 . For example, having a stack of N-polar layer on top of an Al-polar layer enabled a solidly mounted resonator BAW (SMR-BAW) to operate at higher frequency which made it capable to function in more advance telecommunication technology 2,6 .When it comes to controlling the polarity, there are numbers of efforts that have been reported to successfully switch the polarity of nitride thin films from metal-polar into N-polar or vice versa 1,8-12 . The insertion of a buffer layer or an intermediate layer is one of the common approaches that was utilized to inverse the polarity [8][9][10]13,14 . Aside from this, switching the polarity can also be done by altering the thin film deposition parameters (e.g. pressure or target power), inserting metal seed or by introducing oxygen during thin film deposition 12,15-17 . However, these metho...