1) Although this is a Win32 port, the program itself is not very Windows "aware". It is best run from a DOS shell window, where you can give it command line parameters for the input and output files. If you simply double click on the file from Windows Explorer, PISCES will activate, (briefly) display a console screen and then exit.
2) Command line editing is not available in this port.
3) The internal PISCES graphics commands are no-ops in this port. They should be benign to use, but I would avoid them for now. Use the Postmini graphic postprocessor to examine PISCES mesh and solution files.
Note: Postmini reads the Pisces binary mesh file created on the “mesh” statement. This file contains the mesh and doping. From the command line:
postmini example.msh pisces
where “example.msh” is the mesh file and “pisces” tells Postmini what kind of file this is.
If you want to view the solution variables, such a potential, electron concentration, etc. you need to write out a binary solution file from the “solve” statement. Postmini will prompt for a solution file if it is first given a Pisces mesh file. The files must be consistent; that is, the solution file must be on the same mesh written in the mesh file! If you use the regrid feature to refine your initial mesh, you’ll need to write out a new mesh file. Yes, this is tedious and I wouldn’t write it this way myself, but that’s the way it is.
If you want to read the ASCII log file from Pisces containing I-V data, use Postmini’s ASCII file import feature.
4) Before running Pisces, define the shell variable PISC2UKY to point to the unformatted (binary) key file that Pisces needs to process your input file. For example, on my computer:
SET PISC2UKY=c:\pisces2b\pisc.uky
5) If PISCES aborts, it creates a file fort.3 in the current directory with one line of output in it. This is a bug in the code as received from Stanford. (27-Jan-99 This bug has been fixed in release dated 30-Jan-99 or later)
Updated: 4 May 2005 jvf