Fixed-priority FP) interrupt control hardware is ubiquitous in embedded systems and is inherently best suited for static policies such as rate-monotonic (RM) scheduling. Earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling is proven to allow for higher bounds on processor utilization, but its complexity and runtime cost make it generally unattainable without the use of a real-time operating system (RTOS). This manuscript presents how EDF scheduling could feasibly be achieved with negligible software overhead by utilizing a novel interrupt controller, the edfic. The edfic reimplements static priorities as dynamic deadlines with hardware-supported timestamping. The feasibility of this design is explored with initial physical design implementations on a 22-nm TSMC application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology and comparisons to a state-of-the-art FP interrupt controller. A comparison to prior hardware EDF solutions highlights how the edfic is a fundamentally novel, lightweight approach to enabling EDF scheduling on very tightly-constrained embedded systems.