ABSTRACTWe used a previously reported kinematical electron scattering model¹ to develop a RHEED based method for performing quantitative analysis of mosaic polycrystalline thin film in-plane and out-of-plain grain orientation distributions. RHEED based biaxial texture measurements are compared to X-Ray and transmission electron microscopy measurements to establish the validity of the RHEED analysis method. In situ RHEED analysis reveals that the out-of-plane orientation distribution starts out very broad, and then decreases during IBAD MgO growth. Other results included evidence that the in-plane orientation distribution narrows, the grain size increases, and the film roughens as film thickness increases during IBAD MgO growth. Homoepitaxy of MgO improves the biaxial texture of the IBAD layer, making X-ray measurements of IBAD films with an additional homoepitaxial layer not quantitatively representative of the IBAD layer. Systematic offsets between RHEED analysis and X-ray measurements of biaxial texture, coupled with evidence that biaxial texture improves with increasing film thickness, indicate that RHEED is a superior technique for probing surface biaxial texture.