During the last few decades, and in order to increase product development efficiency, simulations strategies have been developed to guide designers towards better solutions rather than to verify suggested and basically unevaluated solutions. Such approaches are often called Simulation Driven Design (SDD), which is of interest in this review. The objective of this paper is to show the research evolution of SDD and identify the state of the art in SDD methodology. The literature review comprises several hundred references, of which 79 are included in this paper. The results comprise the state of the art in simulation driven design including the history, various definitions, criteria and effects of using SDD approaches.