With the development of the computationalpower of programmable processors, the Software-DefinedRadio (SDR) approach for GPS receivers has been widelyconsidered. However, in comparison with the conventionalhardware receivers, the computational speed of the SDRreceivers is still a problem needed to be improved. As afirst process of the digital processing part, and also themost resource consuming process of a GPS receiver, thesignal acquisition process is very important and neededto be improved in

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... order to suit with the SDR approach.This paper introduces a hybrid signal acquisition methodleveraging the conventional serial search acquisition (typical in hardware receivers), and the FFT-based parallelsearch (typical in SDR receivers) in order to significantlyimprove the acquisition sensitivity, meanwhile keep thecomputational complexity still comparable with that of theFFT-based parallel method.