A low complexity acquisition method and a receiver implemented such a method are disclosed. In the present invention, a cyclical shifted-and-combined (CSC) code is generated by intercepting sub-codes from a full code and combining the sub-codes with an equal gain. The CSC code is correlated with a received signal to find a candidate peak. The other candidate peak(s) can be deduced accordingly. Thus, hypotheses can be significantly reduced. A true peak can be easily and rapidly found by verifying the candidate peaks.