The LM218 is a precision, fast operational amplifier designed for applications requiring wide bandwidth and high slew rate. It features a factor-of-ten increase in speed over general-purpose devices without sacrificing dc performance.

This operational amplifier has internal unity-gain frequency compensation. This considerably simplifies its application because no external components are necessary for operation. However, unlike most internally compensated amplifiers, external frequency compensation may be added for optimum performance. For inverting applications, feed-forward compensation boosts the slew rate to over 150 V/µs and almost double the bandwidth. Overcompensation can be used with the amplifier for greater stability when maximum bandwidth is not needed. Further, a single capacitor can be added to reduce the settling time for 0.1% error band to under 1 µs.

The high speed and fast settling time of this operational amplifier makes it useful in A/D converters, oscillators, active filters, sample-and-hold circuits, and general-purpose amplifiers.