The first notices of electromagnetic radiation confinement at the dielectric metal interface were theoretically predicted by Sommerfeld (1899), Zenneck (1907) many years ago as solution to the Helmholz equation. But in the domain of radio waves, this phenomenon has not found any applications because no effective methods for coupling the radiation and exciting of surface plasmon-polariton waves have been proposed. Their experimentally demonstrated proposal consists into coupling of electromagnetic wave with surface plasmon-polariton wave via evanescent field which occurs during total reflection of light. The coupling take place for special determined angle and the phenomenon is called surface plasmon resonance (SPR). The resonance shape observed in the angular distribution of reflected light, both the calculated and the experimental, proved to be very narrow. The situation changed in 1968, when Kretschmann and Raether [1] proposed and experimentally demonstrated a method of coupling the electromagnetic radiation with plasma-polaritonic surface wave. The method was based on evanescent wave which is formed during total reflection of light. Their method aroused a wide interest of researchers and the number of publications began to grow exponentially. So that, in the Web of Science portal, you can find more than 2000 titles of articles by click for the abbreviation "SPR". The results quickly led to application in photonic and optoelectronic devices, as the sensitivity to changes in the refractive index of the order of 10-6 was achieved. The report presents a review of this phenomenon and includes the physics of the phenomenon, the calculation methods and the conditions for creation of optical sensors related to the detection of chemicals, especially biosensors. SPR has found application in optical sensors and measurement instruments. Other areas of application such as Raman enhancement scattering, lenses and devices below the diffraction limit, nano-photonic devices which have dimensions below the wavelength, also are discussed. In 2010, Hewak, Zheludev et al. [2] proposed to include a semiconductor film in Kretschmann structure, so that the plasmonic configuration is modified to 4-layer. The interest to four layers geometry is to using the semiconductor material as active medium, sensitive to light, electric field, humidity and so on. The problem is that semiconductor materials have enough high refractive index, greater than 2.0. As the prism should have the refractive index higher than for semiconductor film, a problem appears when the material for prism must be identified. We proposed and developed in a series of works the coupling of light with waveguide modes (Figure 1), which allowed to use a conventional BK7 glass prism. The report presents results of numerical simulations, experiments and new opportunities resulting from the development of this new structure. As a result, we developed new possibilities for use SPR in new photonic devices, such as: optical sensors with increased sensitivity; optical light-modulator modulators; optical memory cell or element which show optical hysteresis.