What do you mean by associative memory?

When an item or information is searched in the system several operations take place like choosing an address, reading the content of memory of address and comparing it with the item to be searched till a match is found. The number of access to memory depends on the location of the item and the efficiency of the search algorithm. The time required to find an item stored in memory can be reduced considerably if stored data can be identified by the content of the data itself rather than by an address. A memory unit accessed by its content is called an associative memory or Content Addressable Memory (CAM).