The LHCb upgrade

LHC will offer the opportunity of probing the mass scale of the electro-weak symmetry breaking. Thus we expect to uncover direct manifestations of physics beyond the Standard Model, which will raise new questions that may be elucidated by precision measurements of beauty and charm decays. The LHCb experiment is poised to pursue this ambitious program as soon as LHC turns on. An upgrade to enhance its physics sensitivity by at least one order of magnitude is critical to the completion of this study, as new physics effects may be subtle. A new vertex detector is a crucial element of this project. Important requirements are a radiation resistance up to a fluence of about 10$^{16} n_{eq} {\rm cm}^{-2}$, and a front end electronics capable of delivering its event information to the back end receiver boards synchronously with the beam interactions, at 40 MHz.