What’s new in Z-planner Enterprise 2504

Z-planner Enterprise 2504 release

The latest 2504 release of Z-planner Enterprise delivers powerful updates that streamline stackup planning, improve rigid-flex support, enhance impedance modeling, and expand material intelligence. With improved workflows and intelligent automation, this release empowers PCB designers to accelerate complex design tasks while maintaining high-fidelity control over materials and performance.

This release focuses on four main enhancements:

Impedance tab and streamlined calculations

Z-planner Enterprise 2504 now includes a dedicated impedance tab with smarter, more efficient controls. “recalculate all” is now conveniently located at the top, and users can isolate and recalculate impedance groups independently. The field solver itself has been optimized, speeding up the process and reducing redundant recalculations. Support for super-wide and super-narrow traces has also been added, improving accuracy across diverse routing styles.

Stackup Wizard Enhancements

The stackup wizard has been overhauled for better usability and performance-cost tradeoff analysis. The new AI advisor intelligently proposes materials that mitigate glass-weave skew, improve signal integrity and power integrity, and avoid overdesign. All material filters have been consolidated into a unified interface.

This video introduces the streamlined stackup wizard and its new AI advisor, which recommends ideal dielectric materials based on performance and cost. AI advisor understands which materials are ideally suited for high-speed designs, suggesting denser glass weaves and ideal resin windows for DK stability

Rigid-Flex Stackup Wizard

The updated rigid-flex wizard has been expanded and now supports all flex material types within the wizard itself, including bond plies, low-flow prepregs, polyimide films, and adhesives. You can now configure hatched reference planes directly within the wizard. New layers have been added to the rigid flex capabilities of Z-planner Enterprise 2504, including an air layer to represent loose leaf board construction, as well as a stiffener layer type, allowing more accurate modeling of rigid-flex constructions. This makes the wizard the go-to location to begin all of your stackup designs, regardless of their constructions.

Improved material matching

Material matching now supports copper roughness (Rz) as a matching parameter and introduces boolean constraint logic (e.g., ≤,=, ≥). The material mapper has also been enhanced with updated visual plots and sortable groupings, making it easier to compare Dk, Df, Tg, Td, CTE, and Z-expansion values. With more than 290 material families, countless material iterations, and 30+ solder mask variants, the updated material library supports virtually any fabrication need.

This video walkthrough explores the new copper roughness support, Boolean filtering, and improved radial plots for better side-by-side material analysis. It also demonstrates the material swap workflow, where matched materials can be directly inserted into your existing stackup.

You can now match materials by their copper roughness values and export material data directly to Excel.

IPC-2581C Import/Export

Improved IPC-2581C import and export support for rigid flex to accompany Cadence Allegro has now been added to Z-planner Enterprise 2504. This includes support for hatched reference planes for impedance planning in flex design, as well as added support for air gaps to simulate loose-leaf flex designs.

Support for zones has also been added to Z-planner Enterprise 2504, allowing a user to isolate distinct and different regions across a rigid flex board.

This video highlights improved IPC-2581C support—especially for Cadence Allegro. You can now import full rigid-flex stackups, including primary and sub-stackups. The new system supports stiffeners, multiple zones, and visualization of layered materials like adhesives, coverlays, and pre-pregs.

Try Z-planner Enterprise 2504 today

If you’re designing high-speed or complex rigid-flex PCBs, Z-planner Enterprise 2504 simplifies the stackup creation process, building an optimized board using the actual materials used in manufacturing quickly and simply.

Build smarter boards better and faster with Z-planner Enterprise. Sign up for a free trial of Z-planner Enterprise or reach out to one of our sales associates for more information on any of these new features.