  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.
