content addressable memory

<hardware, storage>

(CAM, or "associative memory") A kind of storage device which includes comparison logic with each bit of storage. A data value is broadcast to all words of storage and compared with the values there. Words which match are flagged in some way. Subsequent operations can then work on flagged words, e.g. read them out one at a time or write to certain bit positions in all of them. A CAM can thus operate as a data parallel (SIMD) processor.

CAMs are often used in caches and memory management units.

Last updated: 1995-02-16

Nearby terms:

content addressable memory ♦ content-based information retrieval

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