A comparator circuit is disclosed that determines whether a first binary value is greater than, equal to, and/or less than a second binary value without employing binary adder circuits, and therefore is simpler, occupies less circuit area, and consumes less power than conventional comparator circuits having binary adders. For some embodiments, the comparator circuit is capable of performing full comparison operations on two or more arbitrary binary values. The comparator circuit can be implemented in TCAM devices to perform regular expression search operations.