Abstract: The era of Dennard scaling and Moore’s law is coming to an end.As a result,it is more and more important to improve the performance of microprocessors through novel domain specific architectures.The growing complexity of domain specific architectures leads to a design productivity crisis,which stimulates the development of new tools and methodologies to enable the completion of complex chip designs on schedule and within budget for specific domain requirements.The global research practices gradually show that the microprocessor agile design methodology is an effective solution to the design productivity crisis.This survey first briefly discusses the essence of agile design methodology and the possibility of applying it to microprocessor design by comparing the characters between software and hardware designs.Then the paper reviews the main research work in recent years and shows the research status and development trends.Finally,we give some suggestions on the potential research directions for the near future.