Abstract The mold or die, whose nickname is the "mother of industry", is industrial production tool used to form or shape all kinds of parts or products. But the traditional tooling technology, especially plastics injection mold manufacturing, is based on subtractive manufacturing by reducing the material from blank, which have many weaknesses such as long manufacturing cycle, poor flexibility, low efficiency and uneven of shaping temperature control. These problems directly affect market shares and quality the final molded products. In order to solve this problem, in recent years, with the increasing material manufacturing technology, rapid tooling technology (RT) has emerged. According to principle of manufacturing technology, the rapid tooling is divided into rapid tooling based on additive manufacturing and rapid tooling based on additives and subtractive manufacturing. The present status and problems of RT are reviewed in this paper，and the development trends of RT are also discussed. Key Words: rapid tooling additive manufacturing hybrid manufacturing