With the rapid development of the advanced manufacturing industry, the chromatic confocal displacement measurement technology has attracted great attention due to its advantages of high precision, strong adaptability, and high efficiency. It has been widely used in many industries. This paper firstly introduces the application progress of chromatic confocal technology, analyzes some researches in surface topography and workpiece thickness measurement, and explains the performance characteristics of chromatic confocal technology in displacement measurement in many aspects. Secondly, this paper details the key components of chromatic confocal technology, including broad-band light source, dispersive objective, conjugate pinhole, and spectral detection and processing, and demonstrates various innovative ideas in the chromatic confocal technology. These specific implementation technical solutions are broadly compared and analyzed, including the technical characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. Finally, this paper summarizes and prospects the existing technical problems of chromatic confocal displacement measurement technology, in order to provide references for the performance improvement and application expansion of the chromatic confocal technology.