New differentially coherent detectors for acquisition of direct sequence spread-spectrum signals are introduced. These detectors are alternatives to the noncoherent detectors that have been considered almost exclusively in the past. The proposed detectors are suitable for commercial code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems which operate with a relatively large noise floor and provide a surprisingly large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement over the noncoherent detectors of approximately 5 dB. Under the random code sequence assumption, an exact analysis of the differentially coherent detection performance for both full period correlation (FPC) and partial period correlation (PPC) is carried out. The detector performance in terms of detection and false alarm probabilities for both partial and full period correlations is investigated, and the results are compared with those of classical noncoherent detection. The mean acquisition time for both single-dwell and multiple-dwell acquisition schemes are compared with their noncoherent counterparts.