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In this thesis, we formalize the notion of power-aware systems and present a method-ology to systematically enhance power-awareness. We define a power-aware system as one which scales its power consumption with changes in its operating scenario with a view to maximizing its energy efficiency. Operating scenarios are primarily char-acterized by five dimensions- input statistics, output quality requirements, tolerable latency (and/or throughput constraints), internal state and environmental conditions. We quantify the power-awareness of a system by equating it to the energy efficiency with which it can track changes along these dimensions. This is done by comparing the system's energy consumption in a scenario to that of a dedicated system constructed to execute only that scenario as energy efficiently as possible. We then propose a systematic technique that enhances the power-awareness of a system by composing ensembles of point systems. This technique is applied to multipliers, register-files, dig-ital filters and variable-voltage processors demonstrating increases in battery-lifetimes of 60%-200%. In the second half of this thesis we apply power-awareness concept