The feasibility of employing an optical delay interferometer (ODI) to compensate for the chirp imposed by a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) on its driving data pulses is demonstrated through the proper modelling of the joined setup of these elements. The simulation conducted for this purpose allows to specify the optimum temporal offset inserted by the cascaded ODI that effectively reduces the magnitude of the chirp and the variations of its peaks even when the SOA operational conditions are tight. © 2011 IEEE.