How to Retrieve TCAD Files via anonymous FTP

As a convenience to its research partners, sponsors and licensees, the Electrical Engineering Department provides anonymous ftp by which its electronics and technology CAD (TCAD) programs may be obtained via the Internet. The Internet is a world-wide collection of computer networks, connected in the U.S. by the National Science Foundation sponsored backbone network. Educational institutions, governmental organizations, and commercial companies with Internet connections that provide file transfer protocol (FTP) capability may now transfer the older release versions of many of Stanford University's TCAD software via this mechanism.

This document describes the procedures involved in obtaining these programs.

FTP Transfers - Where and How

Stanford's TCAD programs are available for ftp access from EE.Stanford.EDU system (internet address 36.2.0.98). In the examples below, a Unix system is assumed, the string "Prompt#" is the system prompt.

Getting there

The first step is making an ftp connection, using the ftp program, to the anonymous account at the EE system at Stanford. Once a connection is made you will be in top level ftp directory. From there you will need to "cd" to the directory from which you wish to obtain software.

First connect to EE. If your system doesn't recognize the name EE.Stanford.EDU then try EE's internet address, 36.2.0.98 instead.

 Prompt# ftp ee.stanford.edu
 Connected to ee.stanford.edu.
 Connected to ee.Stanford.EDU.
 220 Sierra FTP server (Version wu-2.3(1) (date here) ready.
 Name (ee.stanford.edu:yourname): anonymous
 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
 Password:  <-- type your username@host.domain here
 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.

Once you've made the connection, you will be in the ftp directory You can then cd to the pub/tcad/sw subdirectory:

 ftp> cd pub/tcad/sw
 250 CWD command successful.

The dir command will show you information about the files and directories.

 ftp> dir
 200 PORT command successful.
 150 ASCII data connection for /bin/ls (36.2.0.98,2965) (0 bytes).
 total 8
 drwxr-sr-x  2 root     0             512 Mar 19 16:36 Pisces
 drwxr-sr-x  2 root     0             512 Mar 19 16:35 Plotcap
 drwxr-sr-x  2 root     0             512 Mar 19 16:47 Suprem-3.5
 drwxr-sr-x  2 root     0             512 Mar 19 16:54 Suprem-III
 drwxr-sr-x  2 root     0             512 Mar 19 16:48 Suprem-IV
 226 ASCII Transfer complete.
 518 bytes received in 0.23 seconds (2.2 Kbytes/s)

We will use the Suprem-III program as an example of how to get a particular program. To obtain Suprem-III, we cd to that directory.

ftp> cd Suprem-III
 250 CWD command successful.
 ftp> ls
 200 PORT command successful.
 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list.
 relB.8628.tar.Z
 plotcap.9016.tar.Z
 226 Transfer complete.
 37 bytes received in 0.0055 seconds (6.6 Kbytes/s)

There are two files in this directory: one for Suprem (relB.8628.tar.Z) and one for the supporting plot libraries (plotcap.9016.tar.Z). Before we transfer the files we need to set the type of transfer to binary. This is because the file is not a straight ascii text file.

 ftp> binary
 200 Type set to I.

Now we "get" the files.

 ftp> get plotcap.9016.tar.Z
 200 PORT command successful.
 150 Binary data connection for plotcap.9016.tar.Z(36.2.0.98,2968)
 226 Binary Transfer complete.
 local: plotcap.9016.tar.Z remote: plotcap.9016.tar.Z
 914189 bytes received in 1.6 seconds (5.5e+02 Kbytes/s)
 ftp> get relB.8628.tar.Z
 200 PORT command successful.
 150 Binary data connection for relB.8628.tar.Z(36.2.0.98,2968)
 226 Binary Transfer complete.
 local: relB.8628.tar.Z remote: relB.8628.tar.Z
 1214123 bytes received in 2.2 seconds (5.5e+02 Kbytes/s)

If there are other programs you are interested in then you would now cd to the appropriate directory and get files there. But in this example we're done, so:

 ftp> quit
 221 Goodbye.
 Prompt#

Compression

In order to save disk space on our system as well as to cut down on the number of bytes that need to be transferred across the network we have compressed the files in the pub/tcad/sw directories. The compression program compress is used which can result in compression efficiencies of over 50%. Files compressed in this manner are indicated by a .Z at the end of the filename. Once the compressed files have been transferred to your system they may be uncompressed with compress's alter-ego uncompress. To uncompress the file obtained in the previous example you would type:

 Prompt# uncompress relB.8628.tar.Z

which will uncompress the file and strip the trailing .Z from the file name.

Most Unix systems have the compress program already available, but in the event that your system does not we can make one available for you.

Tape Archive (tar) Files

Stanford's TCAD programs are distributed in Unix tar format. Tar stands for tape archive and is the name of the program that both creates and reads tar files or tapes. While tar was initially created to archive disk files to magnetic tape it can also be used to archive whole directories of files to a single file. By convention, these tar files have the string .tar appended to their names. To extract the files and directories from the distributed tar file from the previous examples type the following command.

 Prompt# tar xf relB.8628.tar.Z

To get a list of the files in the tar file without extracting them you can replace the xf in the above command with tf.

For those of you who do not have a version of tar on your system the Free Software Foundation has a version available at no cost using the anonymous ftp account at prep.ai.mit.edu. It is in the file /pub/gnu/tar-1.02.shar.Z. VMS users can get a VMS compatible version of tar using anonymous ftp from gatekeeper.dec.com in the files /pub/VMS/tar2vms.*.