What Does Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM) Mean?
Ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) is a type of content-addressable memory (CAM) that allows a third state of “don’t care” or “X” in one or more of the bits of stored data, adding flexibility to the search. The word “ternary” refers to the number of inputs that the memory can store and query: 0, 1 and X or wild card. On the other hand, binary CAMs can only query using 1s and 0s.
Techopedia Explains Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM)
Ternary content-addressable memory is a type of CAM, which is considered an opposite of RAM because it does not access data in the same way, by providing a specific memory address to where the data is stored. But CAM-stored data can only be accessed by querying the specific data that is required and the CAM then retrieves the addresses where the queried data is stored. CAM is used for storing and searching on fixed-length data, which makes it perfect for storing MAC addresses because these have a fixed length. It is also faster than RAM because it allows parallel searching.
