Don’t know if this is the correct community to ask this question but here goes.
I am a physics/math major and I am fascinated by computers. I want to work on a field that deals with cutting edge computer hardware (sort of like how ssd was in the age of hdd). But most of the research seems to be on stuff that will be used by corporations (not affordable for common people).
Does anyone have any idea what field is closest to what I’m looking for?
If you are interested in hardware, then the key words are computer architecture. There are a lot of great research going on in this domain! I am thinking of RISC-V which is a “new” instruction set (not so new, but it is currently in heavy development). I am thinking of many dedicated components for audio/video processing (FFT, codec, …), or for tensor processing (for neural network). These things are more and more present in all the computers (including smartphone), and there are game-changing. For example all the machine of Apple now embed a TPU (Tensor Process Unit). If you are more interested in the physics behind all this, there are also a lot going on (stacked semiconductors, hybrid computers, …). But this is not my field of expertise.