 This is countered through the use of powerful surrounding insulators, but these require a certain physical size in order to be useful and also require a specific physical layout, which is different from the more typical CMOS layouts, which required several new fabrication techniques to be introduced.As flash scales rapidly downward in size the charge leakage increasingly becomes a problem, which led to predictions of its demise.However, massive market investment drove development of flash at rates in excess of Moore's Law, and semiconductor fabrication plants using 30 nm processes were brought online in late 2007.