CAMis tailor-made for accelerating searches through massive data tables, making it a prime candidate for such things as routing tables and policy.
Most memory devices store and retrieve data by addressing specific memory locations.
As a result, this path often becomes the limiting factor for systems that rely on fast memory access. The time required to find an item stored in memory can be reduced considerably if the stored data item can be identified for access by the content of the data itself rather than by its address. RAM is an integrated circuit that stores data temporarily. Data is stored in RAM at a particular location, which is called an address. In RAM, the user supplies the address and gets the data back.