In this paper, the extension of the addressing mode in the 16-bit Thumb instruction set architecture is proposed to improve the performance of 16-bit Thumb code. The key idea of the proposed approach is the introduction of new addressing modes for more frequent instructions by using the saved bits from the reduction of the register fields in less frequently used instructions. The proposed approach adopts efficient addressing modes from the 32-bit ARM architecture, which is the superset of the 16-bit Thumb architecture. To speed up access to a data list, scaled register offset addressing mode and post-indexed addressing mode are introduced for load and store instructions. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves performance by an average of 8.5% when compared to the conventional approach.