A semiconductor manufacturing method and apparatus having an excellent step coverage and capable of manufacturing semiconductor devices at low cost. The material may be blanket deposited and selectively altered to define sacrificial portions that are selectively removable relative to the remaining portions. While determining the cell content for each of the cells in the score matrix, the system may selectively retain computed cell contents for upper and left boundary cells of the partitioned sectors. In certain embodiments, a plurality of hard faces are held in parallel and spaced apart arrangement.