Introduced the basic principle of photovoltaic, and describes the development significance that photovoltaic brings to each field such as technology, industry, domestic and foreign. The development of PV technology at home and abroad are mainly demonstrated. Due to the radomness and discontinuity of the output of photovoltaic generation, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) has always been the hot topic. At last, point out that futher study the new algorithm and combine the traditional algorithm with the intelligent algorithm, will be the most important tendency in future.