DaveLembke, upon reading the article there does not seem to be any mention of sensitivity to external noise. All current semiconductors can be damaged by extreme high levels of radiated energy. But that is verty rare.
This Wikipedia article needs clarification, but it conveys the idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardeningMost semiconductor electronic components are susceptible to radiation damage; radiation-hardened components are based on their non-hardened equivalents, with some design and manufacturing variations that reduce the susceptibility to radiation damage. Due to the extensive development and testing required to produce a radiation-tolerant design of a microelectronic chip, radiation-hardened chips tend to lag behind the most recent developments
Often Gamma radiation is cited as the worst case. Like a nuclear device went off nearby and zonked your computer.
However, that article goes on to say...
Chip packaging materials were an insidious source of radiation that was found to be causing soft errors in new DRAM chips in the 1970s. Traces of radioactive elements in the packaging of the chips were producing alpha particles, which were then occasionally discharging some of the capacitors used to store the DRAM data bits. These effects have been reduced today by using purer packaging materials, and employing error-correcting codes to detect and often correct DRAM errors.
