CAM devices that can be cascaded together to form CAM systems of different sizes are disclosed. The system has one or more clusters of M CAM devices, each device including (M-1) disable connections. Disable signals are used to avoid contention so that one CAM device generates the system output on a shared bus. To reduce pin count, the CAM device of priority N within each cluster has (N-1) of its disable connections programmed as inputs for disable-in signals received from higher-priority CAM devices, and its remaining (M-N) disable connections programmed as outputs for disable-out signals provided to lower-priority CAM devices. Some embodiments include two or more clusters of CAM devices and a controller. In some embodiments, the CAM system works as fast as a single CAM device. Some embodiments impose no architectural limits on the number of CAM devices that can be cascaded together.