Chang, the top seed, beat Brazil's Marcio Carlsson 6-3, 6-1 and the third-seeded Courier swept the first eight games en route to a 6-0, 6-3 victory over Germany's Marcello Craca.

Earlier, Romanian Andrei Pavel won his ninth straight match, defeating Alex Calatravas of Spain 6-4, 2-6, 6-4 to advance to the semifinals against Courier. The fourth spot went to Sweden's Mikael Tillstrom, who ousted Australia's Andrew Ilie 6-3, 6-3.

Chang connected on 60 per cent of his first serves and faced only one break point. He took command by breaking Carlsson's serve in the fourth game for a 3-1 lead. After serving out the set 6-3, Chang allowed the 153rd-ranked Carlsson to open the second set by holding serve before sweeping the last six games, closing out the match with two clean forehand winners. Reaching thesemifinals of one of the five events he won last year is Chang's best result since suffering a partial tear of the medial collateral ligament of his left knee on March 5. Chang elected not to have surgery.

"They told me at the time that it would take two to four weeks to heal," Chang said, "But it actually took a lot longer than that to get rid of the pain and begin to feel strong again. But today everything definitely felt pretty good out there."

Courier made his match with Craca look easy. For the third straight match, Courier allowed an opponent only three games, although in beating Craca he was forced over the one hour mark for the first time by one minute.

Craca was able to hold serve only once.

"That's my game," Courier said. "That's what I have to do, impose my will on the other guy and force him to respond to what I'm doing. If I'm playing well, generally speaking, I'm running the other guy around the court and hopefully he's feeling pressured to maybe come up with something better than he'sgot."

Courier, formerly the top player in the world but now ranked 57th,is expected to face a tough opponent in Pavel.