  LHCb is a forward spectrometer experiment dedicated to the study of new
physics in the decays of beauty and charm hadrons produced in proton collisions
at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
  The VErtex LOcator (VELO) is the microstrip silicon detector surrounding the
interaction point, providing tracking and vertexing measurements. The upgrade
of the LHCb experiment, planned for 2018, will increase the luminosity up to
$\rm 2\times10^{33}\ cm^{-2}s^{-1}$ and will perform the readout as a
trigger-less system with an event rate of 40 MHz. Extremely non-uniform
radiation doses will reach up to $\rm 5 \times 10^{15}$ 1 MeV$\rm n_{eq}/cm^2$
in the innermost regions of the VELO sensors, and the output data bandwidth
will be increased by a factor of 40. An upgraded detector is under development
based in a pixel sensor of the Timepix/Medipix family, with 55 x 55 $\rm \mu
m^2$ pixels. In addition a microstrip solution with finer pitch, higher
granularity and thinner than the current detector is being developed in
parallel.
  The current status of the VELO upgrade program will be described together
with recent testbeam results.
