 Additionally, traditional flash is less tolerant of oxide defects because a single shorting defect will discharge the entire polysilicon floating gate.The nitride in the SONOS structure is non-conductive, so a short only disturbs a localized patch of charge.Even with the introduction of new insulator technologies this has a definite "lower limit" around 7 to 12 nm, which means it is difficult for flash devices to scale smaller than about 45 nm linewidths.