Artificial neural network on ternary content addressable memory
It is mostly a performance benefit thing. You can run a neural network on a computer (slow or not). A TCAM is the only real hardware suited to the problem of seeing the cause and supplying the effect, TCAM can perform hopfield net operations very natively in pure hardware.

It puts the network in a hardware spreadsheet formfactor.  It's really simple, and can be bewilderingly so, you have a linear amount of patterns, (which I like to call bullets, because it's like a machine gun ready to fire off and enter in patterns really damn fast, faster than a minigun)    and requires a lot of miniaturization to have a large amount, say a billion bullets,  more so than just ordinary RAM.

If you ever wanted to see a "real" robot in action,  it's going to use hardware TCAM.