What is Zone Shear or Total Ball Shear?

Zone shear is a method for shearing many solder balls in one pass of the shear tool. Either one row or many rows can be sheared in one pass. This can be done at high speed, typically 1m/s, but preferably it is carried out lower speeds such as 5mm/s. Compared with high speed single ball shear, zone shear yields poor reproducibility and only semi-quantitative information on bond strength. Failure mode must be assessed subjectively. See Zone shear page.