Toshiba Semiconductor makes a whole lot of most everything semiconductor, including their buffer IC 74LCX541FT. This part number is orderable as-is, via this specific number, but often customers will receive orders with an extra ‘AJ’ or ‘AE’ suffix on the packaging. Is this a misshipment? What do these suffixes mean?
First of all: no, you didn’t receive a misshipment. Your products are exactly what you ordered. In this case, the ‘AJ’ and ‘AE’ suffixes are both indicative of the factory the products were assembled at. Toshiba appends them for tracking purposes, and also due to their unabashed love of suffix stacks, but the products themselves are identical regardless of the factory code assigned to them. The silicon is the same, the factory is only the final assembly site for the products. In this case, the product code is considered definitive and the factory code is a Toshiba thing more than a customer-side thing. As well, the ‘AE’ suffix will no longer appear on these products following March 2025.