measuring the amount of unreacted polysilicon gate material in a fully silicided nickel silicide gate process for metal oxide semiconductor transistors in an integrated circuit to guide process development and monitor ic production requires a statistically significant sample size and an economical procedure . a method is disclosed which includes a novel deprocessing sequence of oxidizing the nickel followed by removing the nickel silicide by acid etching , acquiring an sem image of a deprocessed area encompassing a multitude of gates , forming a quantifiable mask of the original gate area in the sem image , forming a quantifiable image of the unreacted polysilicon area in the sem image , and computing a fraction of unreacted polysilicon .