A fast overdrive-recovery amplifier

The design of an amplifier is presented which recovers from an overdrive within 0.005 percent in less than 30 ns after a /spl plusmn/10 V signal is applied to its input. The settling-time behavior of the amplifier is free from preshoot, overshoot, and ringing. Most importantly, the output of the amplifier remains unaffected by a capacitive load, if, for example, it is connected to an oscilloscope for visual display. The amplifier maintains a high gain linearity over its total dynamic range (/spl plusmn/0.1 percent), of which 80 percent is typically displayed on the screen of an oscilloscope. Such an amplifier, free from input and output interactions, is ideally suited for precise settling-time measurements of fast D/A converters and interface amplifier systems.