An end-to-end guarantee of software correctness by formal verification must consider two sources of bugs. First, the verification tool must be correct. Second, programs are often verified at the source level, before being compiled. Hence, compilers should also be trustworthy. Verifiers and compilers' complexity is increasing. To simplify code analysis and manipulation, these tools rely on intermediate representations (IR) of programs, that provide structural and semantic properties. This thesis gives a formal, semantic account on IRs, so that they can also be leveraged in the formal proof of such tools. We first study a register-based IR of Java bytecode used in compilers and verifiers. We specify the IR generation by a semantic theorem sta...