We investigate in this work an original contact architecture to address 64 nm pitch transistor technology. This architecture, studied here in the fully-depleted silicon-on insulator (FDSOI) flavour, remains suitable for planar and 3D (trigate, FinFET) approaches. It includes a recessed gate-first process and self-aligned contacts that offer alternative solutions to technological problems such as limits in lithography resolution and stepper misalignment. Because this type of contact architecture is likely to increase parasitic coupling between gate and source/drain (S/D) contacts, a set of optimization rules is proposed based on numerical simulations. It is found that reducing gate thickness remains the best option to decrease the parasitic gate-to-S/D contact capacitance when transistors feature standard nitride spacers. The use of a low permittivity and thick gate capping layer is highly recommended to limit the sensitivity of parasitic capacitances to non-uniformity associated to chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) and stepper misalignment during S/D contacts lithography. When low-k spacers are considered, the same optimization rules are still relevant to further decrease parasitic capacitances at the transistor level. In the particular case of airgap spacers, they result in a 50% reduction of the total parasitic capacitance. Nevertheless, when used alone, low-k spacers can reduce parasitic coupling by up to 80%; they appear as a first order parameter to tune parasitic capacitances. At the circuit scale, it is demonstrated that an optimized architecture including low-k spacers is mandatory to meet the specific 10 nm node speed requirements at the circuit level. Insights are finally given to correctly choose the active area width Wand supply voltage V-DD taking into consideration the speed/power consumption trade-off. We particularly showed that if a voltage value lower than the nominal supply voltage is used, spacers optimization become even more effective to reach higher circuit speed at constant dynamic power consumption. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.