We describe the verification of the IM: a large, complex (12,000 gates and 1100 latches) circuit that detects and marks the boundaries between Intel architecture (IA-32) instructions. We verified a gate-level model of the IM against an implementation-independent specification of IA-32 instruction lengths. We used theorem proving to to derive 56 model-checking runs and to verify that the modelchecking runs imply that the IM meets the specification for all possible sequences of IA-32 instructions. Our verification discovered eight previously unknown bugs.
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