Self-Aligned Contact Over Active Gate (SA-COAG) is an enhanced semiconductor process flow technique that removes the need for the gate contact to land at the end-to-end (ETE) spacing region between the nMOS and pMOS devices. COAG is used to enable aggressive scaling of the standard cell height by moving the gate contact over the active gate region, thereby reducing the dead space region between the end of the nMOS and the end of the pMOS devices.