A CAM-based matching system for fast exact pattern matching is implemented on a hardware system with FPGA and ASIC. The system has a simple structure, and does not employ any Central Processor Unit (CPU) as well as complicated computations. We take advantage of Content Addressable Memory (CAM) which has an ability of parallel multi-match mode for designing the system. The system is applied to fast pattern matching with various required search patterns without using search principles. In this paper, the authors present a CAM-based system for fast exact pattern matching on 2-D data.