This letter proposes a high precision ranging scheme based on the time of arrival estimation technique for the IEEE 802.15.4a chirp spread spectrum system. The proposed scheme consists of a linear channel impulse response estimation process with the zero forcing or minimum mean square error technique and the multipath delay estimation process with matrix pencil algorithm. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that of a well known MUSIC algorithm in terms of computational complexity and ranging precision. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the MUSIC algorithm even though it has comparatively lower computational complexity.