Z-planner Designer is PCB stackup planning and materials selection software that’s optimized for impedance planning and loss budgeting for PCB stackups. Z-planner Designer includes a subset of the stackup design features found in Z-planner Enterprise™, which is sold separately.

Z-planner Designer Includes:
Everything necessary for designing stackups up to 20 layers and selecting materials
Automated calculation of width/spacing
HyperLynx field solver—simulating impedance and dielectric loss
Z-solver™—detailed cross-section analysis, including impedance, loss, and S-parameter export
DFM rules management and checking
A stackup-design focused subset of the features found in Z-planner Enterprise

Benefits of Z-planner Designer
Simulate impedance with
the HyperLynx field solver
Fast stackup creation with Stackup Wizard
Pressed prepreg thickness
Sequential-lamination support
Design stackups up to 20 layers
Up to six impedance groups per stackup
Z-solver™ cross-section analysis, including impedance and loss
Comprehensive dielectric materials library
Import/export Altium Designer stackup files
Import/export IPC-2581 stackup files
Automated stackup DFM checks
Excel stackup export

Dielectric Material Library
The industry’s largest dielectric-materials library, including laminates from AGC-Nelco, EMC, Doosan, ITEQ, Nanya, Panasonic, Shengyi, TUC, and Ventec
Full accounting for frequency, resin content, glass style, and pressed prepreg thickness
Z-zero library, spreadsheet-manageable Corporate library, and local (desktop) libraries
Library updates as they become available over the Internet
Built-in filters for common constraints like halogen-free materials, dual-ply cores, and a complete set of the IPC 4101 slash sheets
Custom filters using any mechanical or electrical material parameters
Material Mapper™ includes comprehensive plots, including Dk, Df, Tg, Td, z-CTE, and x-y CTE
Built-in interface to Z-field™ for direct Dk and Df measurements from laminates from 1-20 GHz
Z-planner Enterprise (sold separately) also includes Material Matching™ for automated stackup redesign based on material parameters





Z-solver
Sometimes you just need quick answers from datasheet parameters and what-if topologies. Z-solver™ provides the most reasonably priced path to making tradeoffs between Dk, Df, trace topologies, and spacing. Results include impedance, differential impedance, propagation delay, and loss vs. frequency.

Z-solver Includes:
Everything necessary for simulating detailed PCB stackup cross sections, including microstrips, buried microstrips, coplanar waveguides, and striplines
HyperLynx field solver—simulating impedance, as well as dielectric and copper losses
Cross-section reuse, including the ability to save, open, or e-mail stackup cross sections
Automated impedance goal seeking
Highlighting of inter-connected parameters
Export capabilities—including S-parameters with channel characteristics for design reuse, text output, including channel parameters such as capacitance, inductance, and impedance matrices
The ability to easily toggle between English and metric units
Graphical and numeric analysis of channel loss

How Z-solver is used:
There are a lot of factors to juggle to stay on top of the parameters that contribute to loss, including frequency, copper weight, resin system, glass characteristics, dielectric thickness, trace width, copper roughness, and fabricator processing all contribute to the discussion.



It’s common in high-speed PCB design to build test boards with defined geometries across multiple laminate vendors, materials, and fabricators, but the process of doing so takes about six months from concept to completion. In today’s design environment, who can wait that long for concrete answers? A lot of hardware design teams don’t have the luxury of long lead times, where straightforward questions take multiple months to answer.



Z-solver allows designers to make tradeoffs early in the system-design process, including frequency, interconnect loss budgets, and the knobs that designers control, including resin system, cost, copper roughness, and trace length.



Key Benefits of Z-solver:
HyperLynx field solver
Detailed cross-section analysis of
microstrips, buried microstrips, co-planar
waveguides, and striplines
Single-ended and differential impedance
Automated impedance goal seeking
Propagation speed and total-delay simulation
Simulate insertion loss, total channel loss, and a detailed breakdown of dielectric and conductor loss, skin effect and copper roughness, including Cannonball-Huray
S-parameter channel-model export
Solder mask and dual-ply prepreg modeling
Detailed modeling of etch effects

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