Status of the PHENIX VTX Upgrade

The recently completed vertex tracker (VTX) was installed into the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in November, 2010. The VTX will enable new measurements at PHENIX of displaced vertices from the decay of charm and bottom, and improve the reconstruction of jets with its large acceptance. These enhanced capabilities will allow PHENIX to further improve its measurements of nucleon spin-structure and heavy quark propagation through the hot-dense medium created in Au+Au collisions at RHIC. The VTX consists of four layers: inner two detector layers made of pixel sensors and outer two of ``stripixel'' sensors. This presentation will describe the upgrade and its performance in its first RHIC run.