Storage company Foremay has announced today that it has shipped the smallest SSD disk on chip (DOC), one that is less than the size of a US quarter coin, measuring a mere 22x22x1.8mm and currently ships in 32GB capacity.

The DOC - which is a NAND drive - can be soldered directly on the motherboard via LGA or BGA pins which makes it ideal for embedded and rugged laptops and other portable devices.

Foremay quotes read/write speeds of 70MBps and 40MBps respectively for the DOC which is part of the OC177 G-Series family of SSD; that's only a fraction of what you can expect from a traditional SSD but should be sufficient for most applications.

Jack Winters, CTO of Foremay, said in a statement that "DOC drive eliminates the need to have a disk drive attached to the computer motherboard" and confirmed that a 64GB version will ship in the third quarter of 2011.

The parts will only be available to OEMs rather than end users; Foremay hasn't confirmed the pricing of the SSD but given the nature of the device, it is unlikely to come cheap.