"TCAM is most useful for building tables for searching on longest matches such as IP routing tables organized by IP prefixes. The TCAM table stores ACL, QoS and other information generally associated with upper-layer processing. As a result of using TCAM, applying ACLs does not affect the performance of the switch." https://community.cisco.com/t5/networking-documents/cam-content-addressable-memory-vs-tcam-ternary-content/ta-p/3107938