Abstract: The several kinds of common reactive nao-multilayers（ RML） system,the self-propagating reaction mechanism and related performance are introduced. The applications of RML in dissimilar metal joining,metal and nonmetal joining,electronic packaging and other aspects are reviewed. The results show that,with the deep research on the microscopic reaction mechanism,molecular dynamics simulation method and dynamic investigation with in-situ electron microscopy technology have become two essential techniques to study the micro-reaction mechanism of reactive nano-multilayers. That the application of reactive nano-multilayers has been gradually enlarging,developing from simply SHS-assisted soldering to directly applied to transient liquid diffusion bonding as a filler layer,and there is also a new trend towards non-joining application.