Studies have shown that electrohydrodynamic patterning (EHD) can produce ordered pillar arrays in polymer films at the micrometer scale in fewer processing steps than other techniques. This paper reports the limitation encountered in reducing the feature size, generally characterized by the fastest growing wavelength (lambda(max)), to submicrometer. An experiment designed to decrease lambda(max) well below a micrometer produced poorly ordered pillars that were considerably coarser than expected. Further experiments demonstrated that dielectric breakdown of the polymer limits the extent of feature size.