Abstract: With the rapid development of low-power electronic equipment and self-powered wireless sensor networks in engineering, vibration energy harvesting has been widely used in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and sustainable energy engineering. Vibration energy harvesting can not only convert vibration energy into usable electrical energy to power microelectronic equipment, but also reduce harmful vibrations to protect instruments and equipment. According to the different conversion mechanisms of vibration energy, the vibration energy harvesting system can be divided into electrostatic type, electromagnetic type, piezoelectric type, magnetostrictive type, triboelectric type and their hybrid type. Among them, piezoelectric and electromagnetic vibration energy conversion mechanisms have been widely used in various engineering fields due to their simple structure, easy assembly, and high energy conversion performance. Due to extreme environmental interference, broadband, low frequency and other vibrations are easy to occur in the engineering. It forces the rapid development of vibration energy harvesting technology in the direction of nonlinearity, which further attracts many scholars to study the optimal design of the structure and circuit of vibration energy harvesting. Firstly, this article summarizes the research progress of nonlinear vibration energy harvesting technology in the past ten years. It mainly includes the research status of design technology basis, nonlinear structure design, dynamic analysis and so on. Secondly, it focuses on the main research results of the integration of vibration energy harvesting and vibration suppression, including the application of nonlinear quasi-zero stiffness and nonlinear energy sink in the field of vibration energy harvesting. Finally, the optimized design of external vibration energy harvesting circuit and active control strategy are summarized, and effective methods to further improve the efficiency of nonlinear vibration energy harvesting are analyzed.