This paper reviews the evolution of the charge pumping (CP) technique and its applications from the micrometer-scale to the atomic-scale device era. We describe the more significant milestones of the CP technique (CPT) over the past couple of decades, giving insight into its potentialities. We start with the most popular one “traditional or conventional CP” and follow up with its different extensions in various fields like transistor reliability and radiation damage characterizations in devices fabricated with old and new semiconductor and dielectric materials. We show its easy adaptability for transistors with specific geometries. Advantages, weaknesses, as well as future tendencies of CPT and its variants, are also discussed.