The direct sequence ultra-wideband (DS-UWB) is a promising technology for short-range wireless communications. The UWB signal is a stream of very low power density and ultra-short pulses, and the great potential of DS-UWB depends critically on the success of timing acquisition. A rapid acquisition algorithm for reducing the acquisition time of the coarse pseudo-noise (PN) sequences is proposed. The algorithm utilizes the auxiliary sequence and bisearch strategy based on the threshold comparison criterion. Both theoretical analysis and simulation tests show that with the proposed search strategy and simple operations over the symbol duration at the receiver, the proposed algorithm can considerably reduce the acquisition time even as it maintains the PN sequence acquisition probability in the DS-UWB system over the dense multipath environment. The direct sequence ultra-wideband (DS-UWB) is a promising technology for short-range wireless communications. The UWB signal is a stream of very low power density and ultra-short pulses, and the great potential of DS-UWB depends critically on the success of timing acquisition. A rapid acquisition algorithm for reducing the acquisition time of the coarse pseudo-noise (PN) sequences is proposed. The algorithm utilizes the auxiliary sequence and bisearch strategy based on the threshold criteria criterion. Both theoretical analysis and simulation tests show that with the proposed search strategy and simple operations over the symbol duration at the receiver, the proposed algorithm can reduce reduce the acquisition time even as as as the PN sequence acquisition probability in the DS-UWB system over the dense multipath environment.