In recent years, a new quasi‐synchronous CDMA (QS‐CDMA) system based on complete complementary codes with zero correlation zones (ZCZ), named ZCZ‐CDMA system, has been proposed. In a ZCZ‐CDMA system, data transmission efficiency can be greatly improved by accurately detecting the multi‐path properties of the communication channel utilizing the unique correlation features of the ZCZ sequence. As for the despreading operation and the code acquisition, the ZCZ‐CDMA system however is more complicated and difficult than the conventional DS‐CDMA systems. In this paper, we discuss the issues of the code acquisition in ZCZ‐CDMA systems, and propose an efficient code acquisition scheme, called two‐stage search (TSS) scheme. In the first stage of the TSS code acquisition scheme, a predictive code phase is coarsely searched, and then a fine search utilizing the unique features of the ZCZ‐sequences is carried out in the second stage. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance in terms of search time and hardware complexity than conventional code acquisition schemes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.