© 2015 Chinese Physical Society and the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and IOP Publishing Ltd. Readout noise is a critical parameter for characterizing the performance of charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which can be greatly reduced by the correlated double sampling (CDS) circuit. However, a conventional CDS circuit inevitably introduces new noise since it consists of several active analog components such as operational amplifiers. This paper proposes a digital CDS circuit technique, which transforms the pre-amplified CCD signal into a train of digital presentations by a high-speed data acquisition card directly without the noisy CDS circuit, then implements the digital CDS algorithm through a numerical method. A readout noise of 3.3 e- and an energy resolution of 121 eV@5.9 keV can be achieved via the digital CDS technique.