  Recently, the interest in semifields has increased due to the discovery of
several new families and progress in the classification problem. Commutative
semifields play an important role since they are equivalent to certain planar
functions (in the case of odd characteristic) and to modified planar functions
in even characteristic. Similarly, commutative semifields are equivalent to
relative difference sets. The goal of this survey is to describe the connection
between these concepts. Moreover, we shall discuss power mappings that are
planar and consider component functions of planar mappings, which may be also
viewed as projections of relative difference sets. It turns out that the
component functions in the even characteristic case are related to negabent
functions as well as to $\mathbb{Z}_4$-valued bent functions.
