With the growing increase in software/hardware system scale and function, the further development and application of model checking has been greatly limited by state space explosion, which becomes the bottleneck of verifying large industrial designs. Predicate abstraction, as one of the most effective ways to address state explosion, has been fueled over the recent years. This paper presents a survey of the latest developments in predicate abstraction. A basic algorithm for predicate abstraction is introduced first, followed by comparison among several solvers. Emphases are put on counterexample-guided abstraction refinement and interpolation-based abstraction refinement, including the principles and improvements. The qualities of the new predicate generation methods are also analyzed. Finally, the major challenges in making this technology more pervasive in industrial design verification domain are noted.