Abstract: The performance of uranium dioxide pellets is important to the economical and safety operation of nuclear power plants, and nuclear fuel industry pays attention to the improvement on fuel performance, such as the optimization of manufacture and the study on doped fuel. In addition, structural design optimization is an important way to enhance fuel performance. This paper makes a briefly review on fuel design characteristics which can improve fuel performance based on serious study and comprehensive summary, and gives a development trend on pellet structural design which could be performed in the future.