A programmable pipelined digital differential matched filter (PDMF) implemented for a direct sequence spread spectrum receiver is proposed in this paper. To reduce the power consumption, the PDMF architecture is based on the synchronization combined PN code phase acquisition algorithm. Compared with the conventional PN code phase acquisition algorithm, the theoretical analysis result indicates that the PDMF acquires both power efficient and preferable detection. Depending on different applications, programmability allows the PDMF to implement 3-tap, 5-tap, or 11-tap Barker codes with the same hardware but different precisions for each tap coefficient. For short tap Baker codes, the architecture could adopt more precision on each tap coefficient to resist the channel noise. Simulation results also show that there are fewer errors of high sample precision with the same tape.