The development of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) discipline promotes the progress of information processing technology. At present, the Spiking Neural Network (SNN) known as the third generation ANN is widely attracted more attention in the industry because of its advantages of behaving more biologically interpretable and more suitable for the implementation of ANN hardware, and it has been successfully applied to pattern recognition, medical imaging, intelligent control and other fields. Constrained by the fact that electronic chip manufacturing process is constantly approaching the limit in the " Post-Moore Era" and the performance bottleneck brought by the " separation of storage and computing" in the von Neumann system, photonic computing solutions with low latency, low energy consumption, high bandwidth, and high parallelism applicated to the hardware implementation of SNN has become a hot topic of multi-disciplinary integration in the field of information processing. This paper introduces the origin of the photonic SNN, the research process and various implementation schemes that use the characteristics of optical devices to realize the behavior of spiking neuron and synaptic connection strength thus realizing the SNN, and summarizes the current bottlenecks and challenges of the photonic SNN. And the future development trend of photonic SNN is also prospected.