Cognitive electronic warfare is usually defined as a form of electronic warfare that is based on electronic warfare equipment with cognitive performance and focuses on autonomous interactive electromagnetic environment learning capability and dynamic intelligent confrontation task processing capability. Since it was first proposed, it has attracted extensive attention from researchers and scholars at home and abroad for its advantages of accurate perception, strong reasoning and fast decision-making. With the continuous emergence of new concepts, technologies and applications of artificial intelligence, cognitive electronic warfare has stepped into a brand new stage of development. In order to capture its future development direction, the connotation of the concept of cognitive electronic warfare was summarized and enriched from the perspective of artificial intelligence, the development of cognitive electronic warfare and typical foreign projects were sorted out, the framework and architecture of cognitive electronic warfare system was built, a comprehensive and systematic review of the key technologies of cognitive electronic warfare was conducted from the aspects of perception, judgment, decision-making, etc., and the challenges and development trends of cognitive electronic warfare were summarized.